In the first four months of this year redundancies in the Republic are predicted to soar to 324 a day.

That is the grim forecast of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), the country’s main body for personnel managers.

It has called on the Irish government to take action to halt the downward spiral.

CIPD Director Michael McDonnell said employees would feel the full effect of “the triple whammy” of the bursting property bubble, the global recession and the crisis in financial markets.

“Our current expectation, based on available survey evidence and employer soundings, is that the number of redundancies will jump sharply in the early months of 2009. The period between New Year and Easter is likely to be the worst for redundancies since the mid-1980s,” he added.

Labour’s Enterprise spokesman Willie Penrose said the human resource body’s predictions may actually not be pessimistic enough and unemployment could exceed 10% by Easter.